Waco Pride

Last week my brother wrote a two-part blog post about hometown pride (here’s part one and part two). 

For background, we both moved from Waco, Texas to Edina, Minnesota in the summer of 2010, when he was 14 and I was 13. They’re both places that I’ve pretended not to be from at various periods in my life, but for very different reasons. When I moved to Minnesota I told people I was from “somewhere in Texas” because I didn’t want to field questions about the Branch Davidian fiasco and, later, about the fertilizer plant fiasco and the biker shootout fiasco (Waco is sort of a city of fiascos). When I went to Grinnell I told people I was from Minneapolis, at first because I didn’t want to deal with the cake-eater comments and later because I didn’t want to be linked to the Young Conservatives Club fiasco (which, granted, is very local news, but it’s still hard to live down). 

In his blog post my brother talked about how he felt out of place and trapped in Waco, both of which I understand. Our family is deeply midwestern and liberal, so much so that ten years in Waco didn’t change our accents or political leanings one bit (aside from the time when my baby sitter gave me a very biased explanation of how abortions work). I understand feeling like an outsider because not spending our summers at a ranch and not having a family gun stash put us far outside the norm in our elementary school. As for being trapped, the feeling was very literal. Our family lived in a tiny neighborhood bordered on every side by busy streets where drivers had a loose interpretation of the meaning of crosswalks. Without a driver’s license, there weren’t many places you could go.

But even though I know where my brother is coming from on this, I can never see things the same way. For me, Edina will always just be a town. A very nice town, but nothing more than that. Waco, though, Waco is home. Waco feels sacred. Just looking through old photos, or going down the streets on google maps, my neighborhood, my school, the genie-themed car wash we drove by on our way to church, they all seem imbued with some special meaning that I’ve never been able to articulate. 

I first tried to articulate it in a short story that I wrote when I attended the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio the summer between my junior and senior years in high school. It was the first thing I’d ever written that felt like real writing and it ended up being the first piece of fiction published in Inklette Magazine. Like everything I’ve ever written, I can’t stand looking at it. The dialogue is unrealistic, the ending comes off as simultaneously preachy and confusing, and I never really answered the main question of the story: why is this guy so attached to his hometown? The closest I came, I think, was when he suggested that it was beautiful because you had to look to find the beauty rather than having it given to you. That’s part of the answer, but not the whole thing. It doesn’t explain how to find that beauty. To get that you have to go back to the first thing I ever wrote.

Last week I posted a novel I wrote when I was five or six which was, at its best, incomprehensible. You wouldn’t know it because I never described the setting, but it was all supposed to take place in a footpath near the suspension bridge where I used to play with my friend Emily, specifically in this red-brick tunnel blocked by metal bars. If I passed it today I probably wouldn’t think anything of it, but back then we were sure that there was something strange and magical down that tunnel and we were always looking for the key that would open it. The world my brother longed for was a world where it snowed in the winter and kids rode their bikes wherever they wanted in the summer. For me, it was whatever lay at the end of that tunnel, or the planet where the imaginary alien friend loop-de-joop came from, or all the magical worlds I imagined superimposed over my everyday world. I guess Micah got the better end of the bargain, he actually got the world he wanted, but I’m still grateful for what I had.

I don’t think that any place has an essential essence that can be summed up in a few sentences. I made some of my best friends in Waco and some more in Edina, and there are plenty of jerks in both. A place only means as much as your experience there, and my time in Waco meant more to me than I can ever properly describe.

The First Story I Ever Wrote

You might remember from last week’s post that I’ve been spending the break digging up forgotten family lore in the basement. Well, after further excavation I discovered what might just be the first thing I’ve ever written: the opening chapters of a novel entitled Secret Chain, which I now present in its entirety. I spent about twelve recesses laboring over the manuscript back in kindergarten and, looking back at it now, I think the effort shows. For the ease of reading I have corrected the spelling; added paragraph breaks, quotation marks, and periods; and made the letters all face the correct direction.

Chapter 1: The Leaf Map

I was playing with Emily at my house. Then I found a leaf map. It told us to go to a door. A secret door that we had been to before. It said “help me.” That was not happy. We asked my mom.

“Okay,” she said. “I will drive you there.”

We saw tons of things that looked like slime monsters. One of them charged at me. I pushed a button on my watch. It blew up. I did it again and the same thing happened. Then one of them bit Emily. I twisted the button on my watch and time stopped. Everything stopped except me. I threw the monster.

There were rocks across the water. We could get wet. The only way to go without getting wet was to follow the leaf map. It was something like a cliff of boulders. I started to climb. “Emily,” I told her. She did not move. Then I remembered something. I twisted a button on my watch. Then I let Emily look at the leaf map. We don’t want to get wet.

“NO, JOHN OSLER!” said Emily.

“OKAY EMILY, I WILL GO!” I said.

I climbed. Then I pushed a button on my watch. One boulder turned into lava. When all the lava went out there was a key but it was all in the lava. I got a stick and I got the key with the stick. The lava went away. I got the key in my pocket. “See, Emily?”

Then a rock released the lava so Emily had to go with me. 

At the top we saw a huge monster. The king of monster. Five monsters stuck together. Emily took a tooth out. Then it ate Emily, then burped her out with its heart. It blew up. There was an arrow pointing the way.

“So let’s go, John.”

Chapter 2: The Amazing Mess

It pointed to a secret door we had tried to open before. It was locked up but we had the key. We unlocked it. It was an amazing mess. I went in. It was wet. My shoes got wet. There were two ways to go.

“John, you go that way and I will go left, okay?”

After a little while we were lost. Then I said, “Anyone?”

“JJJOOOOHHHHHNNN!”

There was Emily. I went to her. 

“If we or I or maybe you can smash that wall we can make an exit now!” said Emily.

“What did you?” I said.

“MAYBE YOU COULD MAKE AN EXIT FOR US WITH YOU WATCH!” said Emily.

“NO!” I said.

“Why?” said Emily.

“I’m out,” I said.

Then Emily said, “What do you mean, John?”

I said, “I MEAN I'M OUT OF POWER!”

Then I removed the strange battery. 

“Why,” I said. Then the watch shut down. This was not what I wanted. Then I noticed there were five more hands. They were the year, ten years, and a thousand years. I started to drink it. Then I had some power. I jumped through the wall, then back with some power for my watch.

Then Emily said, “Now!”

Then I said, “No!”

Then the floor fell in. Then we jumped out and grabbed a key.

Chapter 3: Segregation

This is as far as I got. As disappointed as I am that my bold adventure story never took its planned detour into racial politics, I think this short but powerful fable teaches powerful lessons that we all can learn from, most notably that watches can blow up slime monsters and stop the world but rarely if ever tell time, the most important thing to keep in mind during an adventure is how wet your shoes are, and driving your son and his friend to a monster-ridden layer is a sign of good motherhood! Also, I was sort of a condescending jerk to Emily, huh?

John's Somewhat Irregular Writing Habits: Daily Prompts

I just now noticed that every part of my daily writing prompt routine was, in some way, a gift. The mug I use to hold the scraps of paper with the writing prompts was a Christmas present from my friend Griffin (which also included a headless Barbie and a cardboard box with “Arthur’s House” written on it, it’s a long story), the notebook came from a care package from an alumni, and the idea came from the New York Writer’s Institute at Skidmore College. The New York Writer’s Institute was one of the highlights of my life, and I think the experience that inspired the daily prompts illustrates why pretty well. One night a text went out on the session one fiction workshop groupchat that we were having an impromptu writing party and within a couple minutes everyone had assembled in the living room of someone’s apartment. We all wrote out a writing prompt on a scrap of paper, put them in a cup, and responded to them one by one in five minute writing sessions followed by a round of readings. Some of them were funny (“perspective of a pillow” was one of the prompts), some were serious, usually I came away impressed and a little intimidated by what the people around me had come up with in five minutes, but overall it was just plain fun. Writing is almost always created and consumed in isolation. That’s part of the draw to the craft for introverts like me, but even then it tends to get lonely, so being thrust into such a lively community dedicated to writing was just so refreshing.

I had such a good time at Skidmore, it only makes sense that I’d try and recreate it on my own. So three weeks ago I cut up about a hundred little scraps of paper, filled as many of them as I could with prompts, put them into Griffin’s mug and started a new routine. Every morning from then on out I’ve gotten up, pulled a prompt at random from the mug, taped it into the notebook, and written anywhere from a couple sentences to four pages on it after breakfast. I set a timer for five minutes, but almost always end up going over (which means I’ve had to sprint to make it to my research methods class more than a few times, but it’s still worth it). 

To give you an idea of the kind of prompts I use, here are a couple examples I drew randomly just now: “Trading cards,” “There is a balm in Gilead…” “Start with a real memory, then fictionalize it.” Sometimes I do nonfiction if the prompt fits and I feel compelled, but usually it’s a first person fiction story. 

I realize that between this and the random name generator, there’s a recurring theme of randomization in my writing (sometimes there’s another layer of randomization since the prompt has me roll a dice to choose from a set of possible prompts). I think that comes from a fear of writer’s block, being stuck on where to start or what to name a character. Having an answer pulled at random might seem like surrendering too much control for some writers, and maybe some day I’ll find a better system, but for now I’m happy enough to go with whatever will put words on the page.

In most senses, I think, daily writing prompts have been a success for me and I’d recommend them to other writers. Writing just makes me happy, even if the subject matter is dark (as it almost always is), so it’s a nice way to start off my day. Usually the writing is unpolished and the story is unfinished, but a couple of times I’ve written something I’m actually proud of.

Still, I haven’t been able to recapture the fun of that night at Skidmore for the obvious reason that I’m doing it alone. I guess that’s just something I’m going to have to accept, since writing in groups is fun but never as productive as doing it on your own. Still, if anyone wants to meet up for breakfast and do a few prompts some time, let me know.

John's Somewhat Irregular Writing Habits: Writing Logs

I’m not a huge fan of National Novel Writing Month* (or NaNoWriMo). Granted, I’m not as staunchly against it as my brother (who’s somehow so far against it that he’s for it, since he spent last November crafting his own entry mocking the contest), but I still don’t like it. I tried one year, but the constant focus on hitting the word count every single day seemed to make writing a chore and I ended up 40,000 words deep in a story that I didn’t particularly like with no way to back out and start over. For me, and for most of the participants I’ve talked to, it was an intense month with every free moment spent on a project that we abandoned on December 1. That’s not to say that NaNoWriMo doesn’t have its benefits, I know people who legitimately liked the experience and it’s great for building community (I met someone through the website who I’ve workshopped a couple stories with), but it’s not for me.

So when I read Stephen King suggest that a new writer should do 1,000 words a day in his book On Writing, at first I dismissed it just another form of NaNoWriMo. But the rest of the book spoke to me so deeply (for better or worse, which I’ll probably touch on in a later blog post) that I felt compelled to give it a try. So I added another notebook to my collection (which I think was at a meager eight back then) and started keeping a daily word count. 

Though I’m not nearly experienced enough to make any valid recommendations for new writers (since, in the grand scheme of things, I’m a new writer myself), I think that if you’re just starting out, you could do worse than to try this. It doesn’t take much time, just a few seconds to highlight any new passages that you wrote and use the word count tool, plus some simple addition if you’re working on more than one project. I used to manually count up things I wrote  longhand, but then I realized that I was cutting back on writing time so I’d have time to count it up, and cutting back on writing time is never a good thing. So now I just do page count for those. I count editing days by the page too too. You don’t even need to have a goal right away, I find that mine shifts without any conscious effort on my part. I started out aiming for 1,000 words, but after a few months naturally started doing 1,200 on my lower days. I’m averaging 1,700 a night right now, hoping to hit 2,000 by the time I graduate. Of course, counting writing I do for school helps pad my average, but I don’t think it’s cheating. Essays are writing too, and at the stage I’m at any practice helps. 

If I were more statistically inclined I would have run some tests on the years of data I have by now, or at least taken monthly averages and seen how I’ve changed over time. Part of the reason I haven’t is because I’m always wary of using writing-related projects to procrastinate real writing, but moreover I don’t think I would learn anything. Just by taking the numbers down I get a better sense of how my own writing habits than I think I would otherwise. I tend to write a lot at the beginning of stories, strain to meet the word count around the middle (with spurts of productivity around particularly exciting parts) and usually finish off with a few 4,000 to 5,000 word nights. I write the least when on vacation or right before or after moving from home to school and back, and the most in long stretches when life is in a stable routine. 

Of course, sometimes I wonder why the daily writing log works for me but NaNoWriMo doesn’t. The key difference, I think, is that NaNoWriMo treats writing as a chore while the writing logs treat it as a career. In NaNoWriMo, you have to put all your focus towards this one project in this one month, and after that you get a t-shirt and bragging rights and more often than not forget the whole thing. The writing log doesn’t bind you to any project and doesn’t expire at the end of the month. It just invites you to sit down for an hour and translate something from your mind onto paper. Usually the winds up writing more than you would on a NaNoWriMo day, but it never feels like it.

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*NaNoWriMo is an annual competition/challenge in which participants attempt to write a novel (defined as 50,000 words) in a month. It takes place in November.

John's Somewhat Irregular Writing Habits: Notebooks

I just counted and it turns out I currently have twenty twenty two notebooks. Five are normal journals where I jot down a few sentences describing each day, nine are for various creative projects, three are little spiral notepads to carry around for whenever I need to write something down quickly, two are for recording my daily word count, one is for daily writing prompts, and two are blank sitting around for the next time I need a new one. As with my post on Dungeons and Dragons, I’m only realizing how strange this habit is now that I’m writing a blog post about it. I’m not a technophobe (I mean, I do sometimes stay up late worrying what makes us special as humans if artificial intelligence might one day replicate our thinking, but in the concrete sense I’ve got nothing against writing on my computer), I’m environmentally conscious enough to know that I probably shouldn’t use so much paper, and my handwriting is so bad that even in college professors sometimes put frowny faces and notes like “work on improving intelligibility” on my handwritten assignments. So why do I stick with notebook writing?

Part of it might be that I think notebooks themselves are cool. I always try to remind myself not to let the aesthetics surrounding writing distract from the writing itself, but it just feels satisfying to write in something bound and hardcover with my initials printed in silver lettering on the front. My favorite is one that my dad got at an underground school supply store in China with a poem printed on the cover: “A good laugh and a long sleep/ Are the best cures in / The doctor’s book and / Love is a carefully designed lie.” I’m not sure if that’s a translation error or if nihilism is just the best way to get Chinese kids excited for schoolwork, but it made me happy to write in something so compelling and deeply weird, even if I never managed to match it with anything on the inside pages.

That was my first notebook. I think my dad intended to keep it for himself, but I had just gotten a note from the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio, which I was getting ready to attend in a few weeks, and one of their suggestions was “get a journal, and write in it every day.” That summer, and that journal in particular, marked a critical moment in my writing. It went from a hobby I indulged in whenever the urge struck me to something that I did every night, something that defined me. That’s another reason, I guess. We’re all a little bit attached to the habits we developed when we start out.

I’m home for spring break now, and today I started digging around the old boxes in our basement. They’re filled with relics from our family’s past: models of video game systems my brother made when our parents wouldn’t get us a Gamecube, my mom’s dissertation notes, photos of people I’ve never seen mixed with people I only met years after the photo was taken. In college life moves forward so quickly that you don’t have time to think about what you were doing the week before, so it’s nice  to spend my time away from it building static mental pictures of worlds that existed before I did. I know I’m kidding myself if I think anyone will ever read all of my notebooks, but I like to imagine that they’ll end up in a box in a basement someday, and some kid will flip through them and get a picture of my life, or a life I imagined for someone else. You can’t get that when all your writing is locked in a computer with a password that only you know. Though if I do want to reach someone generations later, I really do need to work on my handwriting.

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Also, Inklette issue six is out today! Check it out!

https://inklettemagazine.com/issues/issue-vi/

John's Somewhat Irregular Writing Habits: The Random Name Generator

Since I’m on spring break for the next two weeks, I’m going to try and write a post every weekday. The first five will be about my strange variety of writing habits, which I’ll kick off today with the blog’s namesake.

I’ve been collecting business cards since eighth grade. On my braver days I’ll go door to door in a line of stores, entering, checking for business cards, taking any business cards, and leaving without a word. Usually I’m too shy, so I wait until whoever is behind the cash register has turned away to swipe them. Art fairs are gold mines, it seems like there’s some kind of correlation between have an interesting name and making art. Doctors offices are good because they can hundreds of individual names on one rack, but it takes a while to collect them all and usually someone comes over to ask why I need the contact info for ten different anesthesiologists before I can get them all. Usually, though, people just take a young adult grabbing the business card for a hotel manager or restaurant owner that he clearly has no need to contact as another weird part of life best left uncommented on.

I’d already filled an old tissue box with my collection before I started seriously writing, it just seemed like a cool thing to collect. When I did start writing, though, I had trouble coming up with names for characters. Nothing seemed to quite fit the people I had in mind, and I was too obsessive to let them go with poorly fitting names. At first the business card collection was just a way to get over that initial block. Draw a card, that’s their name, move on.

It turned out to have more uses than that. Most business cards list businesses and addresses, so I can use it to generate settings too (though that means that a disproportionate number of my stories take place in restaurants in Edina, still need to find a way to work around that). It’s also helpful for generating player names for role playing games. Of course, that means that when the rest of my Dungeons and Dragons party has names like Shorast and Rombutan, the most fantastical option I can dredge up is usually something like Philip Ecton, but even then it feels more authentic (plus all my characters tend to feel like someone from a very different genre plopped in a fantasy world anyway).

Sometimes when I tell people about my low-tech random name generator, they think that using real names will mean bland, uninspired names. And yeah, there aren’t too many people named Shadow or Athena handing out business cards, but people do have pretty wacky and interesting names sometimes. Just glancing through a few business cards, I found Jojo Wubben, Marco Mraz, and Dr. Moe A. Gallagher.

The most common critique, though, is that it doesn’t let you create names to fit the character’s personality or offer an extra layer of meaning. I get the sentiment, and even with the random name generator I often find myself plowing through twenty or thirty cards looking for a name with a pleasant sound to it or some extra meaning or that doesn’t violate the number one rule of writing (an invention of my friend Lucas that no two characters can have names that start with the same letter, which seems trivial but really helps keep characters distinct). But I still feel a need to defend my creation, so I say that the way it works in my tissue box is the way it works in real life. We aren’t assigned names based on how we act or to signify something symbolic about our role in a plot. Instead, we grow into the names we’re given. That’s what I try to do with the random name generator. I give a character a name when they’re still a vague notion, nothing but a necessary piece of the plot or an idea I want to explore. As they get more developed, they come to embody the archetypes and meaning behind a name. Or to subvert it. Or neither, sometimes they just wear their name as a name like anyone else, but it still feels like they grow with it as the story develops.

On Love Medicine and the Edina Fiasco

Even though it’s the week before spring break, typically the busiest week of the second semester (“hell week” in common Grinnellian parlance), for me it’s all felt a long, slow cool down from the insane levels of stress I felt when presenting a paper at the Grinnell Peace and Conflict Studies Conference last weekend*. Grinnell has a strong social justice community, which is one of the things I love about the school and one of the reason I chose it, but it means that you have to be on your toes when you’re a straight white cisgender middle class Christian male talking about something you’ve got no authority on. And since my paper was on the Chippewa identity in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, and my only substantive contact with Native American culture was a two-day field trip to Fort Snelling led by two people of the Dakota tribe (which, importantly, is not the same as the Chippewa tribe), I’d say I didn’t have much authority to go on. It got the point where I was so sure I was going to flub that I told anyone who asked about the presentation that it was taking place in the cornfields at midnight.

I think I played off my anxiety pretty well. My opening remarks, best as I can remember them were, “I’ll be honest, I’m really nervous, and since this is a Peace and Conflict Studies Conference with a bit of a religious theme going on, I think it’s appropriate to say that forgiveness and mercy would be greatly appreciated.”

I wrote my paper for a class for a global Christianities class, and picked the topic because I thought it would be something familiar. I figured that the novel was set in the midwest and I knew the midwest, it was Christian and I knew Christianity, it was a novel and I knew novels, and I wagered that I could work my way through whatever parts of the Chippewa identity I didn’t know about (i.e.: all of it). 

It turned out, though, Love Medicine took what I thought would be familiar and made it unfamiliar, showing me new sides of worlds I thought I knew. Yes, it took place the midwest, but it was a midwest of rural, impoverished Indian reservations worlds away from the preppy suburb I grew up in (Edina gets a callout as a “wealthy suburb” where a Native American boy who manages to hide his socioeconomic class gets invited to parties). It portrayed a sort of Christianity, but placed it in the context of harsh missionary boarding schools that kidnapped Chippewa children, and the context of the indigenous religion that those schools robbed them of, which makes the way that Christianity seeps into the heart of the novel despite its violent history even more powerful. It even defied my expectations of a novel: It had no main character, no linear time, not even an overarching plot, just a collection of individual struggles all tied together with deeply personal connections.

I wrote about how the Chippewa characters deal with a sort of identity anxiety of being unsure how to define themselves in the wake of settler colonialism. Instead of turning to broad, often oppressive cultural labels they define themselves in relation to each other, through moments of profound empathy which are loaded with Chippewa and Catholic symbolism without fitting wholly into either religion. I said that this empathy paralleled the empathy that Erdrich was offering to the reader, especially the non-Native American reader, that by reading the book they could achieve a deep connection with a community that far too many people assume just disappeared with manifest destiny.

The presentation went pretty well, I think, even though in order to get through under the fifteen minute time limit I had to speak so fast that it probably sounded like a really terrible rap with an unusual number of scholarly quotes. After the applause and questions for the panel, I slipped my paper into my backpack, left the classroom, went for a run, and nearly forget everything I’d just said, like I do with far too many assignments.

 But, for once, my Facebook newsfeed actually saved me from apathy. The other day I noticed an article about a proposed bill in Minnesota, sponsored by a vocal conservative faction at my high school (who just settled a frivolous and very confusing lawsuit), that would limit the political content a teacher could deal with. Meanwhile, the school is considering changing the English curriculum to focus less on works by authors of other cultures. I agree that ideally classes shouldn’t make students of any reasonable political leaning feel out of place, but when politics get tied up with the core missions of a school, things get complicated (and this is a discussion we’re going to have to have when we’ve got a president who makes comments that would get any kid detention or worse). And I do think that teaching empathy, especially through fiction, should be one of the core missions of a school. I discovered Louise Erdrich’s work in a high school English class, and the two-day field trip to Fort Snelling, as little as it was, was still education about Native American culture than I’d gotten in the other eleven years of schooling. Both Erdrich’s place on the reading list and the field trip will probably be scrapped if the Young Conservative Club and their backers have their way. 

If you only teach novels born from one point of view, you limit the expansive potential for empathy that reading can offer. You live your life seeing only one midwest, one Christianity, one view of what a novel can be, one the world.

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*Couldn’t find a natural way to incorporate this into the post, but I just want to take a second to say that the rest of the presentations were awesome. The great thing about Peace and Conflict Studies is that the topic is so broad that you can write about practically anything, so presentations ranged from the contemporary reality of child slaves of Ghanian fisherman to the way that medieval beliefs about disease subtly influenced the German rationale for the Holocaust. Not particularly fun topics (mine was one of the happier ones, which isn’t saying much), but fascinating and well-researched. The other presenters on my panel especially tackled some very big, very real issues with a sense of immediacy that made them very impassioned.